Stealth Attempt to Ban Your Guns In Progress

In Washington DC, as law-abiding Americans go about their days minding their business, the machinery of state has found a new approach to attack their right to defend themselves with modern firearms. No longer content to accept the fact that the Second Amendment guarantees the individual right to keep and bear arms, and no longer willing to accept venerable definitions even of inanimate objects, the administrative state will now redefine terms in order to further restrict your liberties, and ultimately, to strip you of them entirely. It will be incremental, and as usual, the method will be to attack at those points where the defenders are less certain, or less committed. The immediate object will be items like “bump-fire” stocks and “echo triggers,” but the ultimate aim is the banning of all “semi-automatic” or “auto-loading” weapons. Those of you who think your shotguns or pistols are safe had better think again. Those of you who think even your revolvers will be exempt had ought to reconsider. Naturally, the military, police, and other official entities will be exempt, and you will be left defenseless, ultimately, because you will not be permitted the means to resist. You might think you can live without bump-stocks or echo triggers, and you might be right if that’s where it would stop, but it won’t. It never does. For that reason, I wish to arm you with the knowledge you need to make a choice, and commit to it in the face of this lunacy, and to provide you the information you need to stop this now. The BATFE has drafted new rules, and you need to comment and oppose them. To make your argument, you’ll need to understand how they’re attacking your liberties.

Let us begin by understanding what they want to ban. In the end, they are intent on depriving you even of lever actions and even more primitive weapons. They will reduce you to blunderbusses used only in ceremonies and re-enactments. To do this, they took the first step by regulating machine guns, so-called “fully automatic” weapons under the National Firearms Act of 1934. In 1986, the Hughes Amendment prohibited the production of new “automatic weapons” for the civilian market. Now, they’re prepared to take the next step. The “problem” they wish to “solve” is that you would be able to fire one round immediately after the previous with an additional squeeze of the trigger. That’s what an auto-loader or “semi-automatic” does. Discharging the round currently loaded in the chamber causes the firearm to load the next round into the chamber, ready to be discharged when the trigger is again depressed. This is accomplished by some combination of spent gas and mechanical operation, the former powering the latter. The long-held definition of a semi-automatic has been that some additional human interaction is required to cause the next cycle, ordinarily another trigger squeeze. A device like a bump-stock merely helps the operator speed up this process. The human operator still depresses the trigger to initiate each additional discharge. What’s different is that the human is merely taking advantage of the natural recoil of the firearm at higher speed. The cost is that the accuracy is sacrificed. The method is to use the slop of the added mechanism to create a circumstance whereby the weapon’s natural recoil and a sloppy hold on the weapon create a moment when the weapon is recoiling, and then quickly returns to it’s firing position, meeting the finger which is positioned to again depress the trigger. The weapon is still a semi-automatic, but human guile has made it approximate the rate of fire of an automatic.

The truth the BATFE’s rule will not now address is that no device beyond the firearm itself is actually needed to accomplish this. Human guile, a bit of practice, and a little time accomplish the same thing. This truth will be “discovered” at some future date, and when it is, the BATFE will move to ban semi-automatics on the exact same basis: That they can be manipulated in such a way as to behave, to the uneducated observer, like an automatic. At present, they are basing it on the idea of “rate increasing devices,” but that’s a hoax. None of these devices increase the rate of fire, but the human inducing it to operate are the instrument of the increase. Since they can’t very well ban humans, at least not yet, or ban fingers, or ban loose or sloppy holds on weapons, they will instead ban the weapons.

I encourage each reader to go view a few videos on youtube. These videos each show a person operating a semi-automatic in such a way as to approximate the rate of fire of an automatic. Here’s an AR-15:

Here’s a Glock pistol:

Here’s a shotgun: Bump-firing a Mossberg 930. I think you get the point. There is no form of semi-automatic that can’t be “bump-fired,” and to be perfectly blunt about it, the fact that owners of any semi-automatic weapons of any description would support a ban on “bump-stocks” or any other alleged “rate-limiting device” is merely an act of ignorance or cowardice.

The only “rate-increasing device” is a human. The only salient fact is that your rights are under attack by the BATFE, perhaps at the direction, or at least under control of President Trump. Congress is certainly complicit, as Republicans in Congress wish to simply make the issue go away, and making BATFE the heavy in an election year is the most expedient way. Republicans can get their ban of bump-stocks without being seen by their pro-gun voters to participate in a vote to ban them. This nifty abrogation of their responsibility is also an shirking of their constitutional role. Permitting them to ban “bump-stocks” or “echo triggers” will next lead to the banning of any trigger modification, including reduced trigger pull weight. Do you enjoy that improved trigger on your Glock? Is that trigger on your custom AR-15 really smooth and light? What about the trigger on your Benelli shotgun? Making them lighter or smoother also makes them easier to bump-fire. Before long, anything that can be bump-fired by any methodology will be banned, factory-standard or not. This will be the end of your semi-automatics. Then it will be double-action revolvers, which in principle, could also be bump-fired. Ladies and gentlemen, I submit to you that permitting the BATFE to redefine the terms will permit them to ultimately ban all semi-automatic firearms, and a few more besides.

There isn’t any question about it: This rule must be stopped, and the NRA is doing nothing about it, at least to date, but they’re not likely to do so, because they want the issue to go away too. To my knowledge, only the Gun Owners of America is taking any action, at least to date. You can help, and you should, even if you don’t own any of these types of weapons, because things may change and the day may come when you decide you want or need one. Banning these items on the basis that they “increase the rate of fire” is astonishingly dishonest, since the only true “rate-increasing device” is human ingenuity. Please visit GOA’s website for more details, and to help by making official comments with the BATFE during the current comment period.

There is one more reason to stop this rule, and it’s a constitutional problem unrelated to the Second Amendment. People have spent millions and millions of dollars on their bump-fire stocks and their echo triggers and so on. A rule that would now effectively make the possession or use of these items constitutes a “taking.” In effect, the rule proposes to steal the value of these items without compensation. Now it is true that I would oppose this even if the government promised to make the owners whole, but the simple fact is that as many as a million of these various devices, perhaps more, are in circulation, and most of them cost hundreds of dollars. It’s hard to say with an exact number, but the amount of value this would steal from the aggregate of their owners is probably in the hundreds of millions of dollars. This violates the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition of uncompensated takings:

…private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation.

That seems pretty straight-forward, and it’s an objection we should all raise.

People with an anti-American point of view favor these gun bans, and bans on “rate-increasing devices.” The problem is that they’re frauds, using each unfortunate attack or mass shooting as an opportunity to steal our liberties. Note that these same devious liars did not call for the ban of Home Depot rentals after one of those trucks was used by a terrorist. Why not? Because too many Americans would reject it. That’s why your voice is needed now: The government, even under President Trump, needs to know that a large number of the American people reject it. Don’t fail to speak out in defense of your liberties, and in the name of reason and fact.